Teenage Caveman (2001) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

For those who need a refresher course, Kids was sort of a pedophile film disguised as a cautionary tale about safe sex. This film is similar except that the effects of unsafe sex are far more devastating than mere AIDS. Sex transmits some kind of pseudo-lycanthropic viral condition which causes its victims to change into something horrible - creatures more horrible even than Jerry Springer. This is also, of course, the natural product extension of the horror movie convention which says that virgins live on contentedly while those who have sex fall prey to nightmarish ghouls, insane murderers, viral infections, and TV's which can only receive Detroit Tigers baseball.

(A humorous reversal of this cliché can be seen in the movie Cherry Falls, in which the stalker only kills virgins, so the High School kids have to have an orgy to survive.)

The story takes place some one hundred years after some extreme meteorological conditions destroyed the artifacts of earthly civilization as we know it. There is no more Home Shopping Network, no more Libertarian party, no more Frappucino. The internet and all of Al Gore's other inventions have long been forgotten. The only remaining written material is some old issues of Penthouse Forum, and the remaining humans use these as primers to teach the youngsters to read aloud. We witness a reading class, as the halting student mispronounces words to this effect:

“I never believed these letters were real until my conservative wife asked me to ream her bunghole with a vibrating dildo”.

They then discuss the new vocab words, a discussion which proves both edifying and entertaining.

The remaining humans are banded together in tribes, living in caves for reasons which are not completely clear, since there appear to be plenty of solid buildings within easy walking distance. The cave adults struggle to survive and rebuild, but the teens just want to hang out near the remains of Circle K stores and smoke the remnants of cigarettes. Our hero, King Teen Cavedude, kills his dad. Dad was raping cavedude's girlfriend at the time, so this should have been a good thing, but the prevailing religious beliefs seem to dictate otherwise. Dad was the religious leader of the troglodytic community, and had earlier chosen the kid's girlfriend to be his protégé or disciple or something, so the violent interruption of their sexual act provokes a firestorm of retribution from the tribal elders, and forces our teenage heroes to mosey away from Caveland and into one of the abandoned cities of the earlier century, but not until after plenty of annoying religious symbolism.

During their travels, they are caught in a storm and have to take refuge in some kind of abandoned laboratory. I didn't make that up. The movie future is apparently not so very different from the past.

Predictably enough, the building is inhabited by a male and female version of Dr Frank N Furter, who go about seducing each of the kids into drugs, sex, and TV reruns of Bill Clinton speeches. Our cavedude hero and his unraped girlfriend remain aloof from this hanky-panky, and that turns out to be a smart move, because the Furters are immortal genetic freaks who can teleport themselves, shape-shift at will, and occasionally turn into genetically enhanced werewolves with magical fucking powers. When they have sexual contact with humans, it makes the humans either blow up good or turn into fellow genetic freaks - and they never know in advance which it will be.

Isn't that special?

That plot could easily have resulted in a cheesefest with even the best production values, but here it went far beyond cheese and into some vile, heretofore undiscovered curd products, because the director was Larry Clark, and that means hand-held cameras, amateur actors, poor lighting, cheap scenery, poor F/X, and an annoying lack of retakes, even when the actors and camera operators completely flub the scenes. Enjoy